Spells, Potions, Curses, Enchantments

This past year was special in my family, when MB aka Erica did DNA testing at both Ancestry dot com, n My Heritage dot com as a cross-reference. Last year my brother had mentioned Ancestry had found a first cousin he'd thought was an error.

Erica's searches revealed unknown cousins on both sides of her family tree! Yes, we figured out that my Dad's youngest brother had a secret, adopted out girl. His sons were some of my fave, younger cousins to hang out with in Maine. Turns out she grew up n lives now in New England.

We are all now friends on FB. Also it felt weird to find out my newly found cousin is just slightly older than me! Luckily she had wonderful parents n a good life. Also she loves cats!

Some cousins are ignoring the new family member's existence, n really it's all up to the individuals. Most of us tho, go with "The more the Merrier" theory. She never had the sibling n cousin ties the rest of us had all those growing years.

My ex's father had apparently re-married n had several more children we didn't hear about. So MB really found some fun new family ties to get to know on that side too. Online tools do make it easy to connect or choose not to as you please.

MB found out alot of interesting things like UK,  n European DNA origins. Plus locations of earlier generations on my side going way, way back!

One of our ancestors who lived in the 1700's lived to be 65. Interestingly, her occupation was listed on a document as "Witch"! Erica's joke on FB when she posted about it was that this fact explained  few things...

(... like some folks in my family having weird, occasional ESP moments.)

The image played with today had color change filter twice to get these Neon-like color versions.

I'd meant to post about this closer to Halloween going by, but here we are almost week 3 in November already! I had uploaded these images a week ago, n just got to the writing part now. Time is really slipping by me lately as I try to sleep more.

This image is original colors. The Dollar Tree had this cartoony- witch pic as a poster in the window. I thought the text n subject might be a fun image to put under my spell...

These are the first color pallet change.

I really like this version.

Here's a closer crop of the original photo used for the above altered images.

Finally we are back to the cartoony - witch's shelf which caught my attention as I passed by.

Time to move onto being thankful to have an extra day off this upcoming week. Yay!

11th Day of the 11th Month

Happy Veteran's Day!
Thank you for all we have because of you!

Berry Red Altered

Well, Halloween went ok, as I had the Day Off n went to visit BBM n kids in the village. I have been very sore from work, but was able to just relax at their house n leave a bunch of "Unknown" blog comments! Woops!

I watched the "stop motion" film "FrankenWeenie" by Tim Burton, in Black n White format. I was amused by the Dracula, Godzilla, n Frankenstein movie references.

As a Disney film it delivered a quality story too. They have a museum of all the miniatures n drawings used in the film in the bonus materials. The amount of work required to do those animations is huge. 

I made a Purple-People-Eater clay-mation stop-motion, short- video film in college once. I used Play Dough, n it took days! Then I recorded guitar finger-picking for the sound track.
I have an idea of the work involved in that film - huge!

TG this week-end is Fall-back" to Eastern Daylight Savings Time, one hour. I so need to  sleep later!  I have been burnt out lately. I haven't had a vaca week since early spring.
Maybe for a week I'll feel more rested...
 

These colors got me craving homemade cranberry foods. I miss those free ones I used to get working on the bogs years ago. I'll have to pay about $3 per pound, then find time to process n make sauce, muffins, bread, n pie, ect.

Also it's easier to find turkey parts at the market  I want to eat it with. All that canned jellied sauce in a can is full of high -fructose corn syrup. I prefer raw cane sugar n honey in mine. 

I like this green one, altho the angle didn't get any berries in it.
It took a long time to do these pics, because the old pc is acting old!
It keeps getting errors at cropping with the mouse, so a few aren't as square as I would like. This was second from the original.

Who couldn't use more green? I haven't hit it big in the lottery yet, but Mega-millions n Powerball huge jack-pots had me dreaming big buying tickets last week. Did you play?

I'd love to have cash n time to play with animation films again. Meanwhile I'm stuck trying to pay rent instead of playing with art. N this old pc is making it difficult to get these buttons pushed. Good thing I have patience still...

Below is the original pic, shown last in the previous post.

This is the same as the top, first cropped one. Hope I get to alter more soon!